This article will not help you get WWDC scholarship, but it will help you to answer your doubts about participating in WWDC Scholar selection for the first time. The following contents are my own ideas and have nothing to do with Apple.
preface
WWDC stands for Apple WorldWide Developer Conference. I’ve been in San Francisco, I’ve been in SAN Jose for the last seven or eight years, and it’s all part of the Bay Area.
WWDC Scholarship is a big game in Apple education system, carrying the only way to the dream palace for student developers, but this way has two in China, the other way is the C4 competition held by Apple China and Zhejiang University since 2016.
Fortunately, I got the WWDC Scholarship in 2019, and was the only one in Beijing that year, which was 1/27 of the Greater China Scholarship. In this article, I will start from my personal perspective and tell you the points that may need to be paid attention to in the whole process of WWDC Scholarship.
background
If you want to participate in the annual WWDC in a normal way, you must first register and pay money to become a member of Apple Developer Program, free of charge, then you buy tickets for 1599 dollars, and finally put you into a big pool to draw, see if your face is black, if you are black, the money will be returned to you. There is a certain probability that will be in, and there are a lot of people in China every year, but from our students point of view, or too expensive.
WWDC Scholarship can be considered as a green channel separately planned by Apple for global student groups. If you enter into this green channel, Apple can cover your airfare from home to SAN Jose, including accommodation and brunch from June 1st to June 8th. And a developer account worth 688 RMB for the coming year.
way
Colleges and universities
There are several universities in the Greater China region that Have dubious relationships with Apple:
- Tongji University (earliest).
- Zhejiang University (closest).
- Shanghai Business School (second close).
Among them, we first launched courses and textbooks on Apple platform with Tongji University, cooperated with Zhejiang University in C4 competitions for many times, and cooperated with Shanghai Business School in winter and summer camps for many times.
If you are lucky enough to study in these universities, you can indeed get more educational resources about Apple China, including hardware and software, than students in other universities in China. However, it should be noted that, as far as I know, these domestic universities have only started to have “orthodox” credit courses into their education systems in the last year or two.
In other words, if you want to learn the Apple platform through traditional “classes,” it’s almost impossible. However, there is a very strange phenomenon here. In the past two years, the students of The business school “rise unexpectedly”. Every year, about 20 people gather together to participate in various competitions and harvest the tickets, which were not rich at first.
event
The official background competition of Apple in Greater China is also mentioned above, mainly:
Chinese College Computer Application Competition
AppContest.net
This competition pays attention to the parallel of creativity and technology. In other words, it is necessary to make a real work to solve some problems, and then raise the barrier of the whole product through technology in the process of solving problems. However, C4 is a socialist event after all, many things can not be disclosed, including almost no channel except the organizers can refer to the previous projects, the video can not explain the problem! But the prize of this competition is really in line with the rich and powerful performance of Apple, is really really very rich ah!
If you win the first prize in C4, your whole team will be on the next year’s WWDC through train. All of you! And there are Apple family bucket to the mouth, before I roughly estimated, the first prize all benefits add up to convert into RMB, estimated to be about one hundred thousand……
The C4 competition is not the focus of this article, so we won’t expand too much here. If you are a student in our school, you can consult @Qyizhong and @Zero who won the third prize in the final last year. In addition, Zero is also the first prize winner in THE C4 small program North China Division, so we can communicate more.
WWDC Scholarship
The tournament’s official website: developer.apple.com/wwdc19
This is Apple’s only WWDC through train competition in the world, but there are also some STEM projects in less developed regions such as Brazil through train indicators, each year STEM projects occupy about 80 of the 350 places worldwide. In addition, it is possible that Apple will have some small competitions or special channels like C4 in other countries, so the number of places currently being offered in WWDC Scholarship channel cannot reach 350 for global student developers.
So, difficulty is very large, the channels and the crowd is more than just the domestic competition, but the world, including the group of childhood had good design and computer technology influence the western children, so, once through the channels you want to get tickets for WWDC, must adjust their attitude and state as well.
Fortunately, Apple China maintains a QQ group, which almost covers all the previous scholarship winners in Mainland China, including those who have won the scholarship for three consecutive years. Welcome to join the communication.
project
WWDC Scholarship began in 2017 (if I remember correctly) requiring all people to submit the works of Playground version. Before 17 years, it was a complete APP. Works of Playground version should not be connected to the Internet. Fortunately, you can choose iPad Playground or Xcode Playground. In order to save trouble, I used Xcode Playground to complete the work.
The following content will not cover the details of the research and implementation of the work. If you want to see more detailed content, it can be seen:
- WWDC 2019 Scholarship & A complete use of Playground (ii)
The rules
WWDC Scholarship is the most rule-free competition I have ever participated in in the whole university. You can think that there is no restriction, really there is no restriction, but the competition with no rule restriction is often the most fatal, because we can’t know which point is the judge’s value in this way, there is no way to defeat one by one.
Therefore, some predecessors have found out the following points, combined with my own previous experience:
Creativity > Technology
Creativity is a hard currency, can you believe that some of the big guys did a visual programming work like Storyboard on playground, and it didn’t work out
If you’re making iPad Playground, you’d better play with your iPad Playground, and if you’re making Xcode Playground, you’d better play with your Mac Playground, but you don’t have to. But if you’re really good at it, you’ll have the upper hand.
What is Playground
I believe that most of you, like me, have never touched or even heard what Playground is at the beginning. It is recommended to play Swift Playground on Mac or iPad first, so as to have a good understanding of what interesting things the official and third parties do on Playground.
From my point of view, we should not make Playground a complete work any more. We need to make Playground into an interactive and programmable e-book. Users must be allowed to interact with your Playground. Interactivity is a big part of Playground! Bear in mind that
limit
The limitation of Playground is very big, it cannot be connected to the Internet, the maximum size cannot exceed 25MB, it must be in English, and the experience must be completed within five minutes, etc. These rules are updated on the Scholarship official website every year, but they are basically the same. I think the most fatal thing is that the Internet cannot be connected and the size is limited.
In addition, the overall file of Playground should not exceed 25MB. If you want to make mL-related things and throw in non-Apple models, you must ensure the size of the model by using CoreML for interface compatibility. As you can imagine, this is almost fatal, and you basically have to go it alone with CreateML.
idea
If you want to study Apple’s taste, watch WWDC videos for more than a year, which is also what many predecessors said, but Apple does not mandate the use of new technology in the works, and we should not be obsessed with this point.
We can think about the social issues and actions Apple has paid attention to in recent years from another perspective. For example, last year, I considered Apple’s social issues such as education and environmental protection in the past two years, and brought my works along. This is a good idea.
In addition, if there are really no good ideas to cut out, Apple maintains a list of almost all the open source entries from the start of the Scholarship competition on GitHub. I also learned the grammar of Playground and which types of works would be rejected from this list.
Past works: WWDC Scholarship
submit
In the final submission phase, we will be asked to write some descriptions, so make good use of this part! It is impossible to make a fool of yourself in a few words. You should understand why you learn Computer Science, how you learn it, whether you help other students, how you help them, what you have done and so on.
Fortunately, I have participated in many volunteer activities and held some competitions. If you have the same experience in this part, please remember to explain it carefully. Of course, it must be in English, and you’d better find a good English student to polish it.
In the “Submit” page, you can choose whether you need Apple to help you buy airline tickets and apply if you need them. Apple also accepts resumes at the bottom of the page. If you really want to work at Apple, you can attach your resume.
These two operations will not affect our work evaluation, rest assured.
The results of
If you pass the badge, Apple will send you a series of emails to confirm the information on your badge. Only English letters (if I remember correctly) are supported. Remember to choose a cool name.
If I still live in the dormitory of SAN Jose State University according to the standard of last year, I can choose my roommates by myself. But after all, it is my first time to go abroad and I am not familiar with the place, SO I chose a big guy Hengyu, who is studying at UCSB, as my roommate. I met apple’s iWork Team in his moments of friends a few days ago.
Every email sent by Apple should be kept well. In particular, please remember to apply for a receipt, which is very important for visa application and customs entry. The officer will not ask any strange questions when he sees it.
conclusion
Even if the whole process of WWDC Scholarship application is explained above, the general talk is methodology, I hope greater China can hit a new high this year!
Other guidelines
- How did I get the WWDC18 Scholarship
- WWDC18 scholarship points north
- How to get a WWDC Scholarship (twice in a row)
- A concise walkthrough for first-time WWDC developers